The lake was exceptionally naughty…

Once again, I found myself with some time to give the nearby lake a good paddling. It’s said that in order to get real physical development you have to work out to exhaustion…so I did. Five hours of giving the lake a paddling, and over 15 miles of travel in the process. My goal is to get to the point where I can set out and get comfortably to and from anywhere on the lake that I might want to go during a single paddling session, at least if I leave early enough.

The Minister of the Front End of the Kayak is out of town, so I struck out bravely all alone in my explorations. It’s just as well – the Minister of the Front End doesn’t like going to the civilized side of the lake. She’d much rather head into areas of the northern side of the lake to poke around the tree-lined inlets. I, on the other hand, find the populated side of the lake much more interesting. It’s not that I dislike the more wilderness-themed areas, but to me one “beautiful expanse of tree-lined lake shore” (alligators and random fishing boats aside) looks pretty much like any other. There are all kinds of odd things to find hidden in the populated side of the lake, however. I’m mentally kicking myself for forgetting to get a picture of the “Southern Empres”[sic – looked like they’d lost a letter] Paddlewheel boat as I paddled by. Not all of the interesting things are even human-derived – the bird-covered island was kind of a surprise.

Interactive map with track and pictures (which will hopefully display correctly now) may be found below (RSS feed readers, you may need to click through to the actual blog post to see it; or, download the .kml file of this weekend’s Lake Conroe paddling trip [width=540;height=540] and take a look at it in Google Earth…)

I’m going to have to paddle back out to “Zach’s Bar-B-Q Barge” for lunch one of these days and see how they are. Checking out the publically-accessible and potentially paddle-friendly establishments on the lake is one of my excuses for getting out into the Big Room for exercise.

Full-scale and fully geolocated versions of several photos from this trip may be found at the Panoramio page. I’m also still thinking about getting a recorder and incorporating some audio into these things. Hopefully Firefox 3.5 will actually be released one of these days…

Now, back to bed. I have to get up to start the work-week in about 8 hours…Good night everyone, and let me know how the map works and how the pictures look…

Exhaustipated, but I’m home

I had to forgo the pleasures of lounging in the hotsprings, due to the excess of time it took to load up Flagella for the trip back and finish running errands. I had to get out of Idaho while the getting was good, as another storm was on the way. Still, the return trip wasn’t a total loss:

FloppyCow gazes from inside Flagella (my car) at the beer I just picked up at New Belgium Brewing Company - La Folie and Frambozen
I managed to score a couple of bottles of La Folie and a six-pack of Frambozen. FloppyCow is jealous. These brews may make a decent relaxative with which to treat my exhaustipation.

I learned a few things playing with my prototype “Where Was I? application for Asterisk. For one thing, I need a longer greeting message, so that my asterisk box will still be listening when my cellphone finally obeys me mashing on its keypad and sends the tones. For another, Suddenlink may be screwing me over on my outgoing data (I’m supposed to be getting 384k outgoing, which ought to be plenty of bandwidth, but strangely enough from outside my VOIP packets are getting completely screwed up. I need to research this to see if it’s really them.) In any case, I had fun playing with it, and now have a better idea of how to (re-)design it for regular use.

Meanwhile, though, now that the car is finally unloaded again it’s time to rest and try to remember everything else I needed/wanted to get done during the holiday break.